Good change management relies on clear and helpful communications about the upcoming changes. To smooth the path of your Office 365 or Intune or Dynamics 365 deployment, your rollout communication plan should include four areas:

1. What information is to be communicated
2. The delivery method used for the communications
3. Who receives the communications
4. The timeline for communications

Let’s review each area in more detail.

What needs to be communicated?

Determining what information to be communicated depends on when in the service rollout process you are communicating. You might decide to communicate in waves to your organizational groups and users, starting with a service rollout kickoff, followed by pre-enrollment, and follow up with post-enrollment. Let’s discuss the type of information that could be communicated in each wave.

Kickoff wave

Broad communications that introduce the project itself. It should answer questions like what is service being deployed, why the organization is adopting it (benefits to the organization and users), and provide a high-level plan of the deployment and rollout.

Pre-enrollment wave

Broad communications that include additional information about the service and complementary offerings (for example, Office, Outlook, OneDrive, Intune), user resources, and specific timelines for when organization groups and users are scheduled to receive the service.

Enrollment wave

Communications targeting organization groups and users that are scheduled to receive the service. These should inform the users that they are ready to receive it and provide enrollment instructions along with contact information for getting assistance or asking questions.

Post enrollment wave

Communications targeting organization groups and users that have enrolled in the service. These should provide additional resources that might be helpful to the user, and collect feedback about their experience during and after enrollment.

You may find this end-user enrollment guide helpful. You can use it as is or modify for your organization.

Communication delivery methods

There are several delivery methods you can use to communicate the service rollout information to your targeted organizational groups and users. The following list shows some examples and the wave you can use the method with:

• Organizational-wide in-person or Microsoft Teams meetings used for kickoff wave
• Email used for pre-enrollment, enrollment, and post-enrollment waves
• Organization web sites used for all waves
• Yammer, posters, and flyers used for kickoff and pre-enrollment waves

Communications timeline

After determining what you need to communicate and the methods you will use, determine the timeline for your communications that includes when and who would receive the communications.

For example, the initial project kickoff communications can target the entire organization or just a subset, and take place over several weeks before the service rollout begins. After that, information could be communicated in waves to organizational groups and users, aligned with their service rollout schedule. The following example is a sample high-level Intune rollout communications plan:

Our objective is to assess your current security state and offer solutions to remediate high priority security concerns.

Project will be considered successful when you get information about:

1. Your single-digit SecureScore
2. List of potential vulnerabilities sorted by the order of importance
3. Recommendation on how to increase your protection and SecureScore
4. Quote for IT Partner’s services in case you’d like us to work on your tenant hardening

IT Partner is responsible for

• Office 365 data collection and analysis
• Building of a Security Report

Client is responsible for

• Providing a dedicated point of contact responsible for working with IT Partner.
• Coordinating any outside vendor resources and schedules (if needed)
• Setting up a temporary access with global admin permissions

Out of the scope of this project (additional cost items)

• Initial setup and configuration of any Office 365 services
• Gathering of any data located outside of Office 365 tenant (desktop computers, servers, active networking equipment is out of scope)

Prerequisites

• You must have an Office 365 tenant used in a production environment
• You must have a global admin access to your Office 365 tenant

Plan

May vary depending on your needs.

1. Kickoff meeting
2. Identify security objectives
3. Assess your current security state and identify security gaps
4. Provide recommendations and best practices
5. Create an actionable security roadmap
6. Meeting to review the deliverables

Results

You get a clear understanding of how to protect your cloud-migrated business from sophisticated threats hidden in email attachments and links; protect yourself from data leaks helping you prevent sensitive information like SSNs and customer credit card numbers from being shared outside your business; how to control and manage access to information.